INNOVATORS Gold Award - New Orleans City Business

INNOVATOR
M.S. Rau Antiques
Key innovation: using a customer relations marketing
software to manage and match inventory and clients
Where they’re based: New Orleans
Top executive: Bill Rau, president and CEO
Year introduced: 2004
2007 sales: $51 million
PHOTO BY FRANK AYMAMI
THE ROMANCE BETWEEN 96-year-old M.S. Rau
Antiques and a hot, young software program called Pivotal
CRM has given birth to $50 million-plus revenues post-
Hurricane Katrina when other businesses have struggled.
Although he’s a third-generation owner of the largest
volume antique dealer in the nation, a business steeped in
history and tradition, Bill Rau never stops looking forward
and investing in technology to streamline business
operations.
“I remember when my father would sell something, he
would scratch it out of the books,” said Rau, who recalls
installing the company’s first computer system around 1991.
Several years ago, Rau invested in a customer relations
marketing software program. Because it lacked capabilities
specific to the antiques business, it was disappointingly
nothing more than a glorified telephone directory,
he said. In 2004, Rau discovered the Pivotal CRM and
had it customized by St. Louis-based Maverick
Technologies to support M.S. Rau’s needs.
“From a retail standpoint, we’re very unique because every
single item is unique,” Rau said. “To cross-sell effectively and
make sales data meaningful, we need to carefully group and
categorize products by type, style, era and so forth.”
M.S. Rau’s thousands of antiques are catalogued and
available for the company’s catalogs and Web site. The system
is updated every time an item is sold. Additionally, the
dealer’s numerous clients are catalogued with personal
preferences, buying habits, wish lists and even special occasions
such as birthdays and anniversaries.
“Before, we would buy things and hope they matched
what people wanted,” Rau said. “Now, we very much use
technology to try and figure out what we should be buying
instead of going by the seat of our pants.”
The new system was just getting its legs when Katrina
hit. Nancy Kuo, information technology director who
had only been on the job two months, retrieved all of the
Pivotal CRM data before evacuating and ran systems
from a host company in Dallas. Through this arrangement,
Rau was able to contact customers. He sent an e-
mail, reporting on the status of employees, the business
and New Orleans as information unfolded.
“The customer communication we were able to do
through Pivotal CRM kept M.S. Rau Antiques alive,”
Kuo said.
When it became clear New Orleans wouldn’t rebound
that quickly, the new software allowed M.S. Rau to tap
into a much bigger, virtual market than what would have
walked through the doors on Royal Street.
“Walk-ins used to account for 60 percent of our business,”
said Chief Financial Officer Scott Ferguson. “Now
roughly 70 percent of our business is done online
through Pivotal CRM.”•
— Angelle Bergeron
M.S. Rau Antiques salesman Phillip Youngberg, right, shows a Tiffany silver flatware set to customers Dorothy Guthrie, left, and Ann
Calhoun.
New Orleans CityBusiness 25A